Eye-Mon Ya Le'pt!!

Let's demystify the canker sore. There's really nothing embarrassing about getting one - it happens to the best of us. Getting a canker sore doesn't mean you've been eating kitty litter or drinking water from the toilet bowl. You can do all that stuff without actually getting a canker sore (You might die, but with no canker sores.)

There are many common, everday reasons why these little buggers show up. It could be from stress or poor nutrition. Food allergies often cause cankers sores and, believe it or not, so do menstrual periods. Heck, getting canker sores can also be genetic - one family may be more canker-prone than the next.

For some reason Catherine and I are canker sore magnets. I believe our mouths are the perfect storm of allergies, stress, nutrition and genetics. We're both a walking petri dish of canker.

Especially Catherine. She inherited from her family a long history of canker. In fact, I think the family crest has a canker sore in the corner.

Catherine gets canker sores when the wind blows. Granted, women are more prone to the canker sore than men, but when God handed out the canker gene, I think She must've tripped and spilled extra into Catherine's mouth. Oops, God may have said. Ummm..... sorry about that. Here, I'll make you extra pretty to balance that off. [poof!]

Complaining about our canker sores has become somewhat of a sport for Catherine and me.

Look at this!, one of us might say to the other on any given day as we pull back our lip to display the infection.

No, thanks, the other one will respond and quickly escape into another room. Unfortunately you can run but you can't hide from the canker. The infected one will inevitably follow you wherever you go, all the while pulling out their lip with thumb and forefinger to expose the sore.

C'mon! Look! Just look quickly!
(Though with fingers firmly on lip, that usually comes out as "C'ba! Loo! Jus loo kickly!")

There's only one way that this scenario comes to an end, and that's with one of us peering into the mouth of the other and confirming the hideousness with an "ewwww, that's disgusting". And then we go on with our regular lives.

I can't quite figure out the purpose of the canker sore and, apparently, neither can any doctors. It's not really known what causes them and they don't seem to play any particular role in human existence. Let's face it, the mouth is an important hole in the human body and adding any extra holes within the mouth are, in general, a bad idea. Holes in the teeth, holes in the gums - really, other than the primary hole that defines the mouth, there are no other holes in there that don't cause excruciating pain.

Which leads us to this past week. I got the canker sore to end all canker sores. It was ridiculously huge and enormously painful. It felt as big as a blimp shoved between my bottom lip and gum and it hurt like a mofo. When I was a kid, I once read about this old torture trick where the bad guys would put a weasel on somebody's stomach and cover the weasel with a bowl. Then they'd put hot coals on the bowl. In trying to escape the heat, the weasel would scratch and burrow into the person's stomach. (Disgusting, I know.) That's how my canker sore felt - as if a weasel was burrowing into my gums.

I could barely talk without wincing. Everyday my canker sore seemed to get bigger and more painful. Loo! I'd scream at Catherine as I pulled my bottom lip out as far as it could go. C'bon, jus loo at dis kickly!

Finally, by day three, I had grown a pretty serious speech impediment. It hurt so much to talk that I had to alter my pronunciation to avoid the pain. The word "left", for instance, normally a rather simple word to say, became excruciatingly difficult. For any normal person, in order to say the word "left" one has the top row of teeth barely touching the bottom lip to form the "ft" sound. But for me, that ever-so-slight pulling of the lip caused a searing pain that somewhat resembled the feeling of the sharp end of a spork being shoved into my gums.

The canker sore was so painful it even hurt to run. Still, one day I sucked it up and Catherine and I went out for a jog. I was grimacing and quiet for most of the time. As if the standard leg pain isn't enough during a run, now my face hurt. As we made it to the turn-around and proceeded to turn around, Catherine mistakenly began to move in front of me.

On ya le'pt, I said.

What? she replied, still veering onto my side of the path.

Le'pt! Le'pt!! Eye-mon ya le'pt!! I said with annoyance, hoping not to trip on her heels.

Huh? she said, clearly getting frustrated. As if I were purposely trying to confuse her.

LE'PT!!! I screamed as loud as my canker sore would let me. LE'PT!!! I CAN' SAY LE'PT - IT HURTS.. EYE! MON! YA! LE'PT!!!

Catherine turned her head and looked at me as if I were a circus clown.

Life with my canker sore didn't get better after that. Truth be told, I ended up straining my calf. I'm going to blame that on the canker sore.

Since I can't run, I've been sitting around trying to figure out the meaning of my canker sore. Because I know that success doesn't come without pain, I must believe that having endured so much cankerous agony, there must be some achievement that has resulted. I must, in some way, be a better person because of this canker sore. And then I figured it out.

It is my new mission, my one true goal: to rid the world of canker sores. We must free ourselves from the chain of canker. We must be able to retain our ability to eat, to speak, to brush all of our teeth equally without pain. If we can come up with a cure for lupus and herpes, surely we can tackle canker. I just did a quick Google search and there doesn't seem to be a Canker Sore Relief Fund in existence yet. I'm on it. Together, we will be canker free. Grab your Anbesol and unite.

Who's in?